Robert Egger crests a hill in the Santa Cruz
Mountains, and a spectacular view of his 50-acre ranch overlooking
Monterey Bay fills the windshield of his pickup. He and his wife made
everything you see, from the Mediterranean-style adobe house to the
hand-cut stone barn to the huge iron gate through which three chocolate
labs burst forth. They planted the olive trees, tiled the floors, and
even built the muscle car in the garage.

Egger likes to make things. He always has. And the things he most
likes to make are bicycles. When he was in second grade, he was asked
about his dreams for the future. “I want to have a bicycle shop and a
cat farm,” he wrote.

Egger is 51 now, and he still hasn’t started that farm — though he’s
got five cats — but he not only opened a bike shop, he helped shape the
industry. As the creative director of Specialized Bicycles, one of the
world’s largest bicycle manufacturers, Egger has had a hand in some of
the biggest innovations in bicycle design.

“What Robert has brought is really a great sense of design and design
language and also to make products that are viscerally appealing to
people, that you really want to lust after,” said Mike Sinyard, founder
and CEO of Specialized. “And if you look at what Robert has done in the
industry, Robert’s a game-changer. Other people talk about designs, and
while people are talking, Robert executes.”

In an age of specialization, Egger is a rare Renaissance man: an
artist, builder, creator, innovator, misfit and prankster. He’s happiest
when he’s pushing boundaries — and buttons. He’s outgoing, maybe even a
bit arrogant, and brimming with confidence. He’s the seventh son of a
seventh son, a talented and deeply competitive man. But most of all, he
is a man who loves bicycles. He loves riding them and he loves building
them, and he has dedicated his career to spreading that love.

“I want people to rediscover bicycles, I want people to experience
the fun I have,” he said. “My dream is just to see more people on bikes.
If we can get more people on bikes it would really alleviate a lot of
the issues we have in the world. Really, the bike can save the planet.”

He’s been a maker since childhood, because he had to be. He was the
youngest of 10 brothers and sisters raised on a farm in Marshfield,
Wisconsin. Hand-me-downs were a fact of life, so if he wanted something
all his own, he had to make it.

It started with a bicycle.

Egger was 4 and coveted the gorgeous red Schwinn, with its chrome handlebars and streamers, the kid next door flaunted.

“He’d ride by the farm and just give me the eyeball,” Egger said, his
tone suggesting that wound hasn’t quite healed. “I wanted to beat that
kid up and steal his bike. I wanted it more than anything.”

One day his father rolled up in his pickup, the bed stacked full of rusty bicycles and parts he’d found at the junkyard.

“He gave me a pliers, a crescent wrench and a hammer, and said, ‘Go build your own bike,’” Egger said.

He’s been at it ever since. For Egger, bicycles represented freedom,
an escape from the farm to experience new things. Perhaps it is no
mistake that his initials are “FRE” — Francis Robert Egger.

That obsession consumed him, leading him to earn a degree in
industrial design from the University of Wisconsin-Stout in 1984. Every
project involved bicycles, even after his professor dismissively said
they held no future. When Trek offered him a job as designer and chief
product tester after graduation, Egger grabbed the opportunity, if only
to spite his professors.

Spite, and his hyper-competitive nature, also
led him to racing. While in college, Egger often hit the road on an old
touring bike, exploring the countryside with the bike club. One day, the
school’s race team whizzed passed with their matching wool jerseys and
high-end bikes. Egger upped his pace and caught the peloton. “Hi guys,”
he said. “I’m Robert.”

The riders turned up their noses, increased
their pace and tried to drop him. Egger matched, then exceeded, their
pace. One by one, they fell behind. That got their attention. He was
soon on the team, winning races and setting a record for the time trial
in 1985.

He became known as “The Wisconsin Strongman”
because of his monstrous legs. His personality was no smaller. He’d don
black Doc Martin boots and designer jeans and wear his hair shaved on
the side, leaving a curly tuft at the top. It looked a bit like a
pineapple.

“I wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing
that,” said Bob Mionske, his friend and teammate at the time. “But what I
noticed was that four to five years later, that was the style. He was
on the cutting edge of saying, ‘I’m going to do things different.’ His
equipment and his look was fearless.”

He and Mionske were invited to the Olympic
Training Center in 1986, so they went to California with barely $20
between them. It wasn’t what Egger expected. He didn’t fit in, he didn’t
have the money the other guys had and he found he wasn’t interested in
playing the game.

“Looking now at all the Lance [Armstrong]
stuff, you can’t get into that sport and not be a part of the whole drug
thing,” Egger said. “That’s the culture, and I think I subconsciously
saw that at the training center.”

After leaving competition, Egger spent a
year at Blackburn Design, where he worked on a stationary bicycle and a
bike repair stand. It was a cool enough job, but Egger wanted to do his
own thing and left in 1986 to launch a design firm. He worked in a bike
shop in Los Gatos, California to pay the bills.

That’s where he met Mike Sinyard, the founder
and CEO of Specialized, which was much smaller back then. Egger didn’t
know Sinyard — though he knew of him, having heard he was a ruthless but
respected businessman — and had no idea who he was talking to when
Sinyard asked about various products.

“What do you think of these Specialized bags?” Sinyard asked.

Egger, thinking this guy was new to cycling and looking for advice,
was honest. “These are the worst bags in the world,” he said. That’s
when Sinyard identified himself. Egger was horrified, and convinced he’d
lost his job. Instead, Sinyard pressed the matter, so Egger explained
why they sucked and said he could make something better.

“Well, why don’t you make some bags, and if they’re any good I’ll pay you for the design,” Sinyard recalls saying at the time.

Egger accepted the challenge. The following Monday, he rode to
Specialized with the bags. Sinyard loved them — they were innovative,
they were different and they worked. He hired Egger on the spot to work
on a project-to-project basis fixing everything he’d criticized during
Sinyard’s visit to that bike shop.

“It became obvious that we should have him here. We share a mutual
passion for cycling and a pride in creating and doing new things,” said
Sinyard. “I’ve been very lucky to work with a guy like this.”

A quarter-century later, they’re still at it. Egger’s worked on
some of Specialized’s most revered bikes — the world-famous Stumpjumper,
the FSR, the Tarmac and the S Works brand, to name a few — and brought
some soul to the company and its products. Over the years he has strived
to design things that are more than fast, but also emotional and fun.

“Robert is good at doing things that make people smile but also strike an emotional chord,” Sinyard said.

Egger believes there’s no perfect design, and nothing is ever truly
“done.” He tries to learn something new with every project, and “try to
inject a huge dose of innovation.” Form does not take precedence over
function in his view, form is function. He sees “beauty through
innovation” in the way frame tubes are shaped, or the way the vents in a
helmet draw cool air in and hot air out.

He also has brought a sense of fun — whimsy, even — to Specialized.
The company’s HQ in Morgan Hill, California brims with his flights of
fancy. An adult-sized Big Wheel. An off-road unicycle called
“Unipsycho.” A modern pennyfarthing, a snowboard bike and all manner of
beach cruisers and townies.

This mixture of the serious and the silly defines Egger’s
personality. He lives for pranks, and loves nudging people just beyond
their comfort zone. His youthful spirit, relentless drive and design
sense define his work at Specialized.

“Robert was making commentaries on the day,” said Gary Fisher, one of
the godfathers of mountain biking and an accomplished designer in his
own right. “He’s almost like a political cartoonist. He made statements
and impacts.”

Egger also has an exceptional gift for pranks. Like, say, filling a
young designer’s new car with pallet after pallet of water bottles. Or
mischievously moving coworkers’ cars if they’re foolish enough to leave
their keys lying around. He’s been known to brandish a blowtorch in
board meetings, and he keeps a hammer handy to smash prototypes that
don’t quite work.

He’s an equally unconventional designer. He doesn’t own a sketchbook.
He conceptualizes a design in his head, then builds it. He’ll quickly
mock up a prototype, put it on a conference table and get people
talking. What works? What doesn’t? How can it be improved? What should
be added and, no less important, taken away? Egger believes his most
important role is to create an environment in which people can
experiment. Failure is part of the process.

“We make a lot of mistakes,” said Egger. “I always say, ‘If you don’t make mistakes, you don’t make anything.’”

He strives to make things fun, sexy and practical, but most
importantly, he wants to make things that incite emotional attachment.
He wants people who own a Specialized to love it, and those who don’t to
wish they did. He wants everything he designs to convey passion for the
sport.

Egger doesn’t buy anything if he can build it, an ethos he shares
with his wife of 15 years. Together they’ve built motorcycles, cars and
just about everything you see on their vast estate. You get the sense
that if he didn’t have the income to do this, he’d be scouring junkyards
to cobble things together. His tidy workshop overflows with bicycles
and motorcycles in various states of completion, a BMW 2002 he is
restoring and scale models of the house.

“I love to take a bunch of materials and make something out of those
materials and make something that’s greater than the sum of its parts,”
he said.

That’s a good metaphor for Egger: a man greater than the sum of his
parts, always looking ahead to the next project, whether it’s cutting
the stones that will one day be a wall on his property or designing the
next bike you’ll see crossing a finish line somewhere.

“It’s about being on topic,” said Fisher. “You either are riding the
wave, getting pounded by it or miss it all together. Robert is out there
surfing it and getting the fantasy out there. I’m thankful that the
industry keeps guys like Robert around.”